Chickens for 10-20 years or more? Pull up a rockin' chair and lay some wisdom on us!

[featherz]

Pretty sure most production chicken houses use some sort of cooling, fans, swamp coolers, etc. I do have a fan in my coop when needed but I usually just let them free range on extra hot days and they find their own shade. I think it might be different if I lived somewhere where it was 100+ for weeks on end, however.

 

[Beekissed]

Question for the OT folks - is there any thing or any method that wasn't around 40 years ago that you feel is a vast improvement over the way 'grandma' did it? Such as better feed, DE, automatic doors, electric fencing, etc? There are things I use for MY convenience like my automatic pop doors and heated dog bowls for winter that save ME a lot of time with three coops.

Oh, sure!! I don't know about better feed but more availability of mixed poultry feeds and maybe a better understanding of optimal nutrition for a layer flock~though my grandma seemed to get really good production from just corn and free range. Maybe chickens were more feed efficient then? Maybe they produced well on the protein and calcium they had available back then? I'm not sure.

Electric fencing has been around since Grandma but the electric poultry netting is a great new thing for sure.

I've never seen the sense in an automatic door..but I've got a different setup than some folks and never need to open or close a pop door each day. Even if I had a different setup, I STILL wouldn't open or close a door each day. I feed a dog so that I won't have to worry about keeping preds out of the coop~that's a once a day trip. Saves me time.

The heated buckets and bowls are priceless and quite a luxury....I love them!​

 

[perchie.girl]

Quote:
I have plans for a swamp cooler for my coop too. (I have recycled parts for that purpose) I am also toying with the idea of using Terracotta pots or Tiles for nests so the nest boxes say cool. a drip of water on terracotta and it chills down ten degrees. And at 105-115 degrees thats just down to ninety.

 

[featherz]

Quote:
Yah, I don't have time to break water bowls each day. Filling up the heated dog bowls in winter is much quicker. In summer, I use nipple waterers made out of home depot buckets.

As for the pop doors - I don't have time to train a good dog/LGD and I often get home/leave home in the dark so it's nice to know the door will be closed and the chickens will be shut in. If I were home to do it, I'd go without. One of my coops is quite a distance from my house (we made it out of an old horse run-in) so it saves me a walk unless I need to get eggs. We made them ourselves with the add on motor, so not a huge expense.

 

[Beekissed]

I've often wondered about that. I read on here how pricey they are but see where you can lift a whole garage door for less money and was wondering why someone hadn't invented a cheaper solution. I sort of like the old farmer's wind up alarm clock solution. Both frugal and ingenious!

 

[featherz]

Quote:
The only pricey ones are the fancy ones with light sensors, etc. The motor is about $70, then you just make the door yourself and add a cheap timer from walmart. So $75-$80 per door, assuming you have electricity to the coop. Yep, it's a luxury, but without a dog to keep watch I kinda need em. Some people even make cheaper motors by disassembling things, but I don't have the know-how.

 

[Clay Mudd]

Quote:
That reminds me... I'm curious what any of the OT think of the "FEED AS SOLE RATION" mentality. They give you bag of... stuff containing no animal protein and no green stuff, and tell you not to feed your chickens anything else.

Then they hand you a bag of scratch and tell you to feed it in addition to the first bag of stuff. Am I missing something here?



footnote: I am an OT in regard to human nutrition, and get a little cynical when people start wanting to calculate ratios and percentages too strictly. That might need to be another thread, though.

 

[Beekissed]

That reminds me... I'm curious what any of the OT think of the "FEED AS SOLE RATION" mentality. They give you bag of... stuff containing no animal protein and no green stuff, and tell you not to feed your chickens anything else.

Then they hand you a bag of scratch and tell you to feed it in addition to the first bag of stuff. Am I missing something here?

I can't speak for the others but I don't do much of anything anyone tells me, particularly if they tell me this is the only way to feed a chicken. I like to explore the boundaries, experiment what works for MY chickens and adjust as things go along.

Mine free range or I might think differently about things, I don't know. Mine get a constant variety, though in the livestock world they advocate not switching diets on animals too quickly for fear of upsetting digestive systems. I don't think that applies to omnivorous animals like chickens...variety is necessary , IME, for them to get the nutrients they need as the seasons pass. Different season, different needs.

Some people are more comfortable~and it saves them time~to just find a good, quality feed mix from a feed store they trust and just go with it. I do this also...but I add things to it in the winter to cut my feed bill and provide more variety for my birds due to their lack of good foraging possibilities in the winter months.

That's just me...and probably because I'm a woman and poor, to boot. The whole grains I buy in bulk(100#) and mix into my layer mash will provide good nutrition still but helps me cut the cost of feeding a quality layer ration to chickens who are not producing at peak. I mix in wheat, oats, barley when I can get it, oyster shell(this is the only season I actually place it directly in the feed), a small amount of cracked corn and BOSS.

In the summer and fall, I like to give garden scraps and stored pumpkins/squash, etc. I even save some pumpkins to feed in Jan/Feb.

So $75-$80 per door, assuming you have electricity to the coop. Yep, it's a luxury, but without a dog to keep watch I kinda need em. Some people even make cheaper motors by disassembling things, but I don't have the know-how

That's certainly cheaper than feeding a dog all year every year, to be sure!

 

[Clay Mudd]

Quote:
Especially when the person telling you to feed X is the person SELLING X.

 

[Beekissed]

Exactly.